symbol explained
Bullet Point
The standard round bullet for plain-text lists.
- Unicode
- U+2022
- HTML entity
- •
Try Bullet Point
Edit the text, then change the font and size.
The short answer
What does Bullet Point mean?
The standard round bullet for plain-text lists. Lists in bios, spreadsheets and anywhere markdown is unavailable.
Background
Where it comes from
The bullet is Unicode U+2022. It matters because plain-text fields — profile bios, spreadsheet cells, chat messages — have no list formatting of their own, so the character has to do the work a list marker normally would.
In conversation
How to use it
Lists in bios, spreadsheets and anywhere markdown is unavailable. Copy the character itself when you need plain text that can be searched, selected and pasted like a letter.
Realistic examples
Bullet Point in a sentence
“Oslo • Berlin • Lisbon”
“• Draft • Review • Publish”
“Designer • Writer • Occasional cyclist”
Tone & nuance
What it communicates
Purely structural. It carries no feeling; it tells the eye where one item ends and the next begins.
Easily confused
Characters that look like •
These are separate characters. However similar they render, they sort, search and compare differently — which is why pasting the wrong one is so easy to miss.
Middle dot
U+00B7
Smaller and lighter. Better between items on one line than at the head of a list.
Bullet operator
U+2219
A mathematical character that looks nearly identical but belongs in equations.
Hyphenation point
U+2027
Used to mark syllable breaks in dictionaries, not to introduce a list item.
For developers
• in code
Each value is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the symbol directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+2022 | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | • | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | • | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \2022 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{2022} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %E2%80%A2 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Common questions
Bullet Point FAQ
What does the bullet point • mean?
The standard round bullet for plain-text lists. Lists in bios, spreadsheets and anywhere markdown is unavailable.
How do I type •?
The fastest way is the copy button on this page, which puts • on the clipboard on its own, without a label or a stray space. To insert it by hand, use the code point U+2022. In HTML you can write • instead of pasting the character. Windows Character Map and the macOS Emoji & Symbols viewer both let you search for it by name.
Will • look the same everywhere?
• is plain text, not an image, so it takes on the font, size and colour of the words around it while keeping the code point U+2022 wherever it is pasted. A font with limited coverage can substitute a different glyph or show an empty box, and some apps restyle certain symbols as coloured emoji, so preview it in the app and theme your readers will actually use.
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